rpg-city-creator

RPG City Creator (Pathfinder 2e, dark-leaning by default)

What this skill is for

Generate a city dossier — the worldbuilding unit between the region (a hex-map of settlements and wilds) and the single location (one dungeon, building, or block). A city is the playable canvas for an arc, a downtime hub, or a whole urban campaign: think a settlement with a defining feature, a handful of factions pulling against each other, a named cast you can roleplay immediately, and live trouble the moment the PCs walk in.

This skill targets Pathfinder 2e (post-Remaster) as the mechanical and lore toolkit. It references the Archives of Nethys (AoN) for deities, ancestries, NPC stat blocks, creatures, and hazards — but the cities themselves are original (not Golarion canon).

The default tone is "dark-leaning" (level 3 of 5): heroic fantasy with shadowy inflections. Heroes can exist, but the city charges a price; victories are possible but cost something; luminous quarters coexist with rotted ones. This is not grimdark and not noblebright. See references/tone-spectrum.md for the full scale.

The core idea — a city is people, not buildings

This is the single most important thing about this skill, and it's where most city generators fail. A city is not an inventory of districts, shops, and services. It is a social pressure-cooker. The great GMs are unanimous on this:

• Sly Flourish (Mike Shea): a settlement needs one fantastic feature, a situation the PCs walk into, and locations built around the specific characters — not the whole town offered as a menu. "You enter the city. What do you do?" is a game-killer.
• Matt Colville: cities are defined by their factions. He built the city of Capital entirely around its faction web, not its geography.
• The Alexandrian: run a city as a network of nodes — who knows whom, who works for whom, who wants what, where — connected by leads, not as a list of addresses.